A blog about economics, finance, business and corporate governance. My background is in economics, with degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins. A career in international development, equity capital markets and as a corporate finance chief and board member lead me to think about events in a different way--hence the blog's name.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Our Futility Against ISIS

ISIS continues to be in the news, and Americans will soon tire of hearing the drumbeats when it becomes evident that progress one day is offset by the entity growing new tentacles and stinging the civilian populations in new ways.

Since our military intelligence and foreign policy machinery are equally ignorant about all parts of the world, perhaps we should be talking with the French, after all they held the Syrian and Lebanese mandates for quite a while. What do they think about our publicity-seeking efforts to bomb ISIS into submission? I suspect that it's not very much.

Some newspaper reporters rightly raise the point that without having President Assad stop his brutalization of his own population and determining desirable options for his transition, a blind campaign of bombing from on high will produce neither change nor retreat by ISIS.

The other obvious question is who is funding ISIS beyond its own internal cash generation from kidnapping for ransom and selling stolen oil in Turkey?

NBC News has mentioned wealthy nationals from Qatar. Ironically, Qatari desires to form an Islamic State in a region combining Syria and Lebanon plays a role in a novel by the French author Gerard de Villiers, "Madmen of Benghazi," linked above. This novel has been around for a while.

Maybe we should be paying an official visit to Qatar and and request that they do start enforcing their own laws against funding political regime change against their own Arab neighbors.